Backyard beekeeping on the island of Newfoundland.

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I was semi-profiled by The Gazette at Memorial University in December 2018 (I work with a film & video production crew at the university). It could be a collector’s item some day because it’s one of the rare instances where I gave someone permission to publish a photo of me. I was asked some general questions about beekeeping and I gave some general answers. The Gazette didn’t have room to published the full Q&A, but I do, so here it is:

Why did you begin beekeeping?

I stumbled onto a gardening blog written by a guy who kept a few beehives on the roof of his apartment in Chicago and I thought if he can keep bees in a cold, windy place like Chicago, then I should be able to do it my tiny backyard in St. John’s. The more I looked into it, the more fascinated I became with honey bees. That was almost ten years ago and I’m just as fascinated today as I was back then.Continue reading →

I’m in the process of rewriting or deleting every single thing I’ve posted to this blog since 2010. It will likely to take me a long time, especially tracking down all the photos that no longer show up. I’m a one-man band here with a full-time job that isn’t beekeeping or writing about beekeeping (though I would take a huge pay cut to do this for a living). I’m aiming for sometime in 2019 to get back to business as usual on this blog, whatever that is. It might not be until December 31st in 2019, but sometime in 2019, I’ll be be back.

I drew up a map of my beeyard yesterday and wrote a summary for each of my hives to include in my beekeeping journal. I normally don’t post this kind of thing, but it may be of interest (probably not) for anyone curious about how a hobbyist beekeeper with a few too many hives keeps records. I’ve been meaning to keep more accurate and more concise records since I started beekeeping in 2010. Maybe next year.

I currently have nine honey bee colonies in my beeyard, up from more or less two at the beginning of the year. (I had four back in March but only two of them got through the spring in okay shape.) I use a simple numbering system to take track of my queens (not my hives): The first two digits represent the year. The last two digits represent the queen. For example: the first queen of this year is 1601, the second queen is 1602 and so on. In my journal I also use some letters to indicate how the queen was created: through supersedure queen cell, swarm cell, mated queen from another beeyard, etc., but I won’t bother with that here. See my recent Beeyard Update for more details and a video.

Here’s an uncut 15-minute video update of where I am with my beekeeping as of today. Not much to see. Mostly just me talking and pointing at things.

A summary for anyone who can’t be bothered: I now have nine honey bee colonies living in Langstroth hives and two nucs with old queens puttering away in the corner. I spent this summer building up my colonies after all but two of them were more or less destroyed by shrews two winters ago. It wasn’t easy. My beekeeping has been a long arduous journey since my third summer of beekeeping when I was forced to move my hives because of unfriendly neighbours, which eventually led me to sell my house in the city so I could buy another house in a semi-rural neighbourhood last year, where I now have a small but private piece of land where I hope to keep my bees in peace for years to come.

P.S.: For anyone who watched the video, yup, there’s a typo at the end of it (mudsongs.orgs when it should be mudsongs.org with no S on the end), but it’s too much trouble fix it.

Mud Songs is not only a non-profit web site. It’s a going-in-the-hole web site. I’ve spent a fair bit of money over the years to keep it online. Let’s forget about the hundreds of hours of unpaid work I’ve put into writing and making videos and taking photos to create content for it. I do this for fun, not money. But now I need money to keep it going. Not a lot of money, but enough so that I can afford a better server, one that isn’t as slow as slush like my current server is half the time. I may even need money from time to time to pay people to do some computery things behind the scenes for me, people who know how to keep the engine humming, so to speak. Shelling out that cash from my own pocket just doesn’t cut it anymore. I’m a poor working slob with a full-time job that’s not about to make me rich any time soon. And I’m not to going ask for money. Putting ads on this blog doesn’t make much sense either. I don’t think anyone reads the actual blog anymore. But splashing a few ads through my YouTube videos could bring in a few dollars. Maybe.

So as of today, most of the beekeeping videos that appear on the Mud Songs YouTube channel will contain advertisements of some kind. I’m testing the waters here to see how it goes. If you see an ad that you don’t like, or you just don’t like the ads at all, tell me and I’ll do something about it. I have no problem turning the ads off completely if they’re annoying.

I’m personally annoyed by most advertisements online, but I rarely see them because I use an ad blocker. That’s why I’m not so concerned about putting ads in my videos. People who don’t like ads probably use an ad blocker already, so it won’t be an issue for them. And I assume people who don’t use ad blockers see the ads as just a part of doing business online. They’re used to it.

I’ve also had a few people tell me advertisements are already running along with my videos in subtle ways through YouTube’s main website. Which means Google (the owner of YouTube) is making money off my videos and I’m not. I don’t see anything wrong with me wanting a piece of that pie. Why not? They’re my videos after all.

Anyway, I sold my soul to Google so I can afford a better server and make some improvements to Mud Songs. I might not make a dime off the video advertisements. If that’s the case, I’ll have to think of something else. But for now, let me know if you have any problems with them. Thanks.

JANUARY 28, 2016: Hold on to your hats because this is amazing. I’ve earned $39.53 from my YouTube videos since November 2015. Clap. Clap. Clap.

I’m beginning to like chickens more than honey bees, purely for the comic relief. There’s nothing my chickens do that isn’t completely ridiculous. I can’t take anything they do seriously. Three of them climbed up the high front steps of my house today because they felt compelled to guard the house, maybe?

The way they walk, the way they run, the way they sound — it’s the definition of ludicrous. The enjoyment I get from just being around these farcical creatures exceeds the pleasure I get from beekeeping. To be honest, beekeeping has been more work than pleasure for the past three years. The simple satisfaction of being with the bees has been overshadowed by a long string of headaches I’ve had to endure, starting with moving my hives in May 2012 so my neighbours wouldn’t complain to the city about them. Now that I’ve finally found a country-like setting where I can keep my bees in peace, I hope I can relax around the bees again and perhaps recapture the wonder of beekeeping like I used to know. And if it doesn’t work out, at least I’ll have the chickens.

I’ve decided to pull the plug on Mud Songs instead of letting it fizzle out and die. Here’s why: When I first began beekeeping in 2010, I kept my hives in my urban backyard and was engaged in a daily fascination with the bees because they were constantly present. I saw the bees every single day, even in the winter, and loved every minute of it. I was glad to share my experiences so others might learn from my stumbles and bumps and little successes along the way. In the summer of 2012, though, I had to move the hives to a rural location because my next door neighbour complained to the city about the bees buzzing around her yard too much. Pretty much overnight, the fuel that fired most of my interest in beekeeping — the constant presence of the bees — was gone. My time with the bees dropped from several hours a day to maybe a few hours a month and none of that time involved the leisurely observations — watching the bees all day — that I was accustomed to when the bees were in my backyard. So that’s it. Even though it’s more work than pleasure these days, I’ll continue to keep bees. But until I have them on my own property again and can reconnect with the fascination I experience from being around them all the time, I don’t see the point in maintaining this web site. The driving force behind most of what I’ve done with Mud Songs is gone. The bees are gone. Not completely gone, but gone enough. With any luck, though, I’ll be back in business within a year or two, chilling with the bees in a different backyard like I used to. Thanks for hanging in there with me. Take care.

Here are four and a half minutes of photos from our first 567 days of beekeeping. It’s not a “best of” collection, but it’s the best I could put together in 20 minutes (there are more photos of bees than beekeeping per se). It should look half-decent played back in full screen at the highest resolution. Recommended only for purists. There’s no music, but I originally had some Geoffrey Oryema on the soundtrack and it was good. You’ve probably never heard of Geoffrey Oryema, but he tends to make quiet night music with lots of echo. Or maybe Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass is more your thing. Whatever floats your boat.

2011 wasn’t a good year for beekeepers on the east coast of Newfoundland. We had a late wet spring, a short cold summer, and we (i.e., the royal we, as in I’m talking about yours truly) made plenty of mistakes along the way. But we managed to harvest about 20kg of honey from our two established hives and it was all worth it.

Here are some photos from 2011 (about 100 photos, approximately 5 minutes)… UPDATE: I removed the slideshow because it didn’t display properly. Here’s a video slideshow that pretty much the same: